Monday, June 30, 2008

Exchange is still not supported in VMware. I wrote couple articles in the past and explained the decision is political, and I have not seen any other issues putting exchange on VMware except the Microsoft is not supporting it, it means we should never go for unsupported configurations. Imagine the trouble shooting tools for exchange won't work because of VM platform, or if you call support PS person will tell you, simulate the same problem on supported hardware and we will help you our (-:, I cannot imagine the stress and trouble any exchange administrator will face if the situation comes to this point not to mention about the business concerns when there is an outage.

We will have some of our exchange servers on VM (bridgehead servers), just because they don't house any mailbox and bridgehead server requires very little configuration, therefore we have several Exchange running on VM over the years and no problems so far.

I did couple P2V the other day for some for some of the exchange servers and run into problems when it comes to assign the IP address to the virtual server after successful P2V. The windows were complaining about the IP address conflict and I got the solution from one of my friend at work and wanted to share with you if you ever need it.

Open command prompt. Type the following:

C:\set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

C:\devmgmt.msc

Click on Show all hidden devices and remove whatever is unnecessary. In there should not be any other NIC device listed, if yes uninstall them and reboot the box to end to the conflict

After removing all other adapters (most likely the NIC's belong to Physical machine) and rebooting it the VM will be happy and peaceful

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The question came today on MSexcahnge.org,, in regards to moving mailboxes and how long it would take to move the X number of mailboxes from Exchange server A to Server B There is not any fix time, anyone can tell you in regards to mailbox move. Your best estimation will be selecting different size of mailboxes and moving them in order to get the picture at the time you are planning to make the mailbox move happen (probably weekend in the night). We did similar test in the past and the time we have recorded for the mailbox move for various size mailboxes, fluctuated in each time, due to other aspects involves into mailbox move (network, available bandwidth, Hardware specs, etc) process.

Here is some good information for you to remember,

Four threads are used for each instance of Move Mailbox, even though multiple mailboxes can be scheduled to be moved

SIS (Single Instance Storage), try not to break it if you want to move the mailboxes faster.

If you move mailboxes from mail store A from Server A to Mail Store B on Server B, you will preserve the SIS

Communicate with the users ahead of time and let them know the mailbox move and make sure they understand they won't lose any e-mail during the move and will have no access to their mailbox or the BlackBerry.

(If a message is sent to one recipient, and if the message is copied to 20 other recipients who reside in the same mailbox store, Exchange Server maintains only one copy of the message in its database. Exchange Server then creates pointers)